My how the semi-mighty have fallen.  The Woody Allen stable of Diane Keaton, Diane Wiest, and Mia Farrow are replaced by Tea Leone, Debra Messing and . . . wait for it . . . Tiffany-Amber-Thiessen.  Worse, the 67 year old Allen still insists on casting himself as a love interest (this time, with 36 year old Leoni).  The courtship is ridiculous and the images revolting.

Worse, the film lacks one funny premise, line or sketch.  Allen plays Allen, arms waving and neuroses on all cylinders. But oh does he have some subversive things to say about filmmaking.

Allen is directing a $60 million picture.  He he he.  And he’s stricken by psychosomatic blindness. Te he he.  But he makes the film anyway, and in the process, reunites with his ex-wife.  And again, they kiss (just vile – you’re praying his teeth do not fall out).  And guess what?  In the end, the French love the film.

Har har har.

Nyuk nyuk nyuk.

It is the worst film of 2002, certainly one of Allen’s most terrible and perhaps the shittiest film of the millennium.  In the face of Hollywood Ending, saying “Well, Allen directed Annie Hall and Hannah and Her Sisters,” is like saying “Well, Hitler built the Autobahn.”

Funny to the point of tears, but a testament to the generous nature of Americans.  My fear was that Sacha Baron Cohen would be cruel to his subjects, but the film is, perhaps unintentionally, quite the opposite.  Yes, the rubes and dudes and New York toughs can be less than politically correct, but what they lack in modern manners they make up for in their easy acceptance of this bizarre, crude faux immigrant who tests the limits of all patience. As Christopher Hitchens noted:

Americans are almost pedantic in their hospitality and politesse. At a formal dinner in Birmingham, Ala., the guests discuss Borat while he’s out of the room… agree what a nice young American he might make. And this is after he has called one guest a retard and grossly insulted the wife of another… The arrival of a mountainous black hooker does admittedly put an end to the evening, but if a swarthy stranger had pulled any of the foregoing at a liberal dinner party in England, I wouldn’t give much for his chances. 

Julianne Moore and Annette Bening are two middle-aged lesbians with two teenage children in the midst of a mid-life crisis.  The kids decide they want to meet their father (Mark Ruffalo, who is actually just their sperm donor).  Very funny, occasionally poignant, and refreshingly devoid of the kind of politics you might fear from such an endeavor.  Bening is particularly good as the controlling, more responsible member of couple, the uncool drudge, trying to keep it all together in competition with cool “new” and fun, breezy Moore.

Will Ferrell’s antics have a shelf life.  There were a few good gags, but Mark Wahlberg steps on a lot of them with his clod-like turn as straight man (he substitutes volume for timing). But we do get a political tract on Ponzi schemes from director Adam McKay during the credits, so, there’s that.

A bro-mance that is actually a menage-a-trois.  John Cusack, Craig Robinson and Rob Corddry go back to the ski lodge of their youth, are transported to 1986, and proceed to do unfunny and boring stuff (often involving their bodily fluids) in the hopes of getting back to the future.  Cusack looks like a hostage.